In particle physics, a B-factory, or sometimes a beauty factory, is a particle collider experiment designed to produce and detect a large number of B mesons so that their properties and behavior can be measured with small statistical uncertainty. Tau leptons and

D meson The D mesons are the lightest particle containing charm quarks. They are often studied to gain knowledge on the weak interaction. The strange D mesons (Ds) were called "F mesons" prior to 1986. Overview The D mesons were discovere ...

s are also copiously produced at B-factories.

History and development

A sort of "prototype" or "precursor" B-factory was the

HERA-B The HERA-B detector was a particle physics experiment at the HERA accelerator at the German national laboratory DESY that collected data from 1993 to 2003. It measured 8 m x 20 m x 9 m and weighed 1000 tons. The HERA-B collaboration consisted of s ...

experiment at

DESY The Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (English ''German Electron Synchrotron''), commonly referred to by the abbreviation DESY, is a national research center in Germany. It operates particle accelerators used to investigate the structure of matt ...

that was planned to study B-meson physics in the 1990–2000s, before the actual B-factories were constructed/operational. However, usually HERA-B is not considered a B-factory. Two B-factories were designed and built in the 1990s, and they operated from late 1999 onward: the Belle experiment at the KEKB collider in

Tsukuba is a city located in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 244,528 in 108,669 households and a population density of 862 persons per km². The percentage of the population aged over 65 was 20.3%. The total ar ...

, Japan, and the

BaBar experiment The BaBar experiment, or simply BaBar, is an international collaboration of more than 500 physicists and engineers studying the subatomic world at energies of approximately ten times the rest mass of a proton (~10 GeV). Its design was motivat ...

at the

PEP-II SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Departm ...

collider at SLAC in California, United States. They were both electron-positron colliders with the center of mass energy tuned to the ϒ(4S) resonance peak, which is just above the threshold for decay into two B mesons (both experiments took smaller data samples at different center of mass energies). BaBar prematurely ceased data collection in 2008 due to budget cuts, but Belle ran until 2010, when it stopped data collection both because it had reached its intended integrated luminosity and because construction was to begin on upgrades to the experiment (see below).

Current experiments

Three "next generation" B-factories were to be built in the 2010s and 2020s: SuperB near Rome in Italy;

Belle II The BelleII experiment is a particle physics experiment designed to study the properties of B mesons (heavy particles containing a beauty quark) and other particles. BelleII is the successor to the Belle experiment, and commissioned at the Supe ...

, an upgrade to Belle, and SuperPEP-II, an upgrade to the PEP-II accelerator. SuperB was canceled, and the proposal for SuperPEP-II was never acted upon. However, Belle II successfully started taking data in 2018 and is currently the only next-generation B-factory in operation. In addition to Belle II there is the LHCb-experiment at the

LHC The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundre ...

(CERN), which started operations in 2010 and studies primarily the physics of bottom-quark containing hadrons, and thus could be understood to be a B-factory of this "next generation." But LHCb is not usually referred to as a B-factory as the experiment and (perhaps more importantly) the corresponding collider (that is, the

) are not used solely for the study of b-quark particles but have other purposes beside b-quark physics.

References

{{reflist

External links

BaBar homepage

Belle homepage

Belle II homepage
Experimental particle physics Particle experiments B physics

History and development

Current experiments

See also

References

External links